Once you have created the perfect craft product trailer in Apple Motion, with the best image pans, text and transitions, its time to use that as your prototype for a Motion template with drop zones.

Drop zones are placeholders for your product images and .mov clips. They are just a gray box with an arrow, indicating that something else should be placed at that location on the timeline. However, its the keyframe transitions and other effects attached to the drop zone thatís important. Once you have all those set up for each placeholder, those effects will work the same when you add your product images to the drop zone.

So to use a Motion template, you only need to replace the placeholder image in the drop zones or the text in the text boxes on the screen. Thatís what we will do in the next few tutorials. First we will take a look at our prototype product trailer (see below).

We will only be duplicating the middle section of the trailer that contains the product images. We will not be using the existing beginning logo reveal or the closing animation. Instead, we will be leaving the first 10 seconds on the timeline empty so that we can import any logo reveal of our choice and another empty 9 seconds at the end for importing a closing. Of course, the background audio file will be replaced to reflect the product.

So what we need to do now is dissect the prototype to get some information about the size of the product images, the duration of each image on the screen and the duration of the transitions between the images.

As you can see from the list below, we have eight product images and each is on the screen for five seconds, with a half second fade in at the beginning and a half second fade out at the end of those five seconds. Also the fade out of the previous product image overlays the fade in of the next product image.

Below is the break down of the prototype, showing the starting and ending positions of each image on the screen and on the timeline, i.e. each drop zone. Remember that Motion's Timing Display shows the location of the playhead on the timeline in number of hours, minutes, seconds and number of frames (HR:MIN:SEC:FR). For example, one and one half seconds on the timeline will be displayed as 00:00:01:15, because we have 30 frames per second.

1 - 10 seconds - Import a pre-made logo reveal

9:15 - 14:15 - First image pans from top left to center of screen

14:00 - 19:00 - Second image pans from bottom left to center of screen